the weather; how they were influenced by new doctrines
and old ones seen in new lights in preaching, lecturing, debating,
bringing up their children, etc., and how they regarded the Indians,
those first settlers and owners of the ground that was being made into
farms.

I well remember my father's discussing with a Scotch neighbor, a Mr.
George Mair, the Indian question as to the rightful ownership of the
soil. Mr. Mair remarked one day that it was pitiful to see how the
unfortunate Indians, children of Nature, living on the natural
products of the soil, hunting, fishing, and even cultivating small
corn-fields on the most fertile spots, were now being robbed of their
lands and pushed ruthlessly back into narrower and narrower limits by
alien races who were cutting off their means of livelihood. Father
replied that surely it could never have been the intention of God to
allow Indians to rove and hunt over so fertile a country and hold it
forever in unproductive wildness, while Scotch and Irish and English
farmers could put it to so much better use. Where an Indian required
thousands of acres for his family, these acres in the hands of
industrious, God-fearing farmers would support ten or a hundred times
more people in a far worthier manner, while at the same time helping
to spread the gospel.

Mr. Mair urged that such farming as our first immigrants were
practicing was in many ways rude and full of the mistakes of
ignorance, yet, rude as it was, and ill-tilled as were most of our
Wisconsin farms by unskillful, inexperienced settlers who had been
merchants and mechanics and servants in the old countries, how should
we like to have specially trained and educated farmers drive us out of
our homes and farms, such as they were, making use of the same
argument, that God could never have intended such ignorant,
unprofitable, devastating farmers as we were to occupy land upon which
scientific farmers could raise five or ten times as much on each acre
as we did? And I well remember thinking that Mr. Mair had the better
side of the argument. It then seemed to me that, whatever the final
outcome might be, it was at this stage of the fight only an example of
the rule of might with but little or no thought for the right or
welfare of the other fellow if he were the weaker; that "they should
take who had the power, and they should keep who can," as Wordsworth
makes the marauding Scottish Highlanders say.

Many of our old neighbors